A Mountaintop Golf Course Construction Worthy of a Legend's Vision

Architect Todd Schoeder praises Aspen’s efforts. “What was thought to be a challenging construction site turned out to be much more difficult than originally anticipated,” he said. “Massive rock outcroppings were uncovered during grading, and with a delicate touch, Aspen incorporated these rugged features into the design without any additional costs.” In all, the routing moved roughly 120,000 cubic yards of the mountain’s indigenous rock.

The rock made the irrigation system its own engineering challenge. Aspen chose an extremely environmentally friendly HDPE pipe, which allowed the crew to install the irrigation system without going as deep into the rock as a PVC pipe design would have required. “This course would be considered ‘green’ already because of the HDPE pipe,” says Ronnie Adkins, Vice President of Aspen, “but Lodestone challenged us with one environmental condition — the rock — that produced an even more ‘green’ project in that we used flat HDPE drain tile that could lay directly on top of the subgrade.”

Aspen drew on its earlier experience building a four-hole addition at Wisp Resort and bridged three construction seasons at Lodestone to learn a great deal about the water table and how to anticipate groundwater and wet-weather spring activity. “There were many areas on several holes that had to have multiple cut-off drains installed,” says Aspen president Donnie Adkins. “These challenges only became apparent after going through the four distinct seasons that occur each year at Wisp Resort. Because we had worked on the previous project, we knew what to expect.”